Talk:McLaren (disambiguation)

Old talk
It's not really appropriate for there to be a disambiguation page here. A dismbiguation page is for where there are two or more articles which share the same "natural" title. For example, Lotus could equally well mean the car company or the flower of the same name, so a disambiguation page is needed. However, that is not the case here - there is only one article listed here that is naturally called McLaren - the F1 team. We don't need a list of people called McLaren, because that doesn't create and article title conflict; nor do we need to distinguish carefully between companies in McLaren group, because they all operate as essentially the same company (virtually any company of any size is structured in this way, and having disambiguation pages in this way for all of them would be confusing and a waste of time).

I would suggest the best way to resolve this is either to move the main Team McLaren here (and perhaps merge the McLaren Group article into it, to clarify the company structure), or to have this page redirecting to Team McLaren.

Keeping the disambiguation page would mean we need to fix all the links pointing here to point to the appropriate articles.

Any comments?

Enchanter 11:18, Jun 5, 2005 (UTC)
 * Team McLaren is a subsidiary of the McLaren Group. The name McLaren can be and is used to refer to the McLaren Group, McLaren Cars, etc. I'm not opposed to moving the article about the F1 team here, but the team and other companies need to be kept separate since they are separate entities. &mdash; Dan | Talk 14:19, Jun 5, 2005 (UTC)

Appropriation
McLaren (disambiguation) → McLaren - Move to proper name will solve solve both the disambiguation and double-redirect issues. -Stevertigo 17:14, 7 June 2009 (UTC)


 * There is another request, to move McLaren (racing) to the plain title. See Talk:McLaren (racing). --Falcadore (talk) 18:14, 8 June 2009 (UTC)


 * I'm absolutely in agreement with Enchanter - there doesn't seem to be a need for a disambiguation page and the F1 team seems to be the only entity that goes by the exact name of "McLaren", plus it's clearly the primary topic. Moving the F1 team page to McLaren (racing) created a hell of a lot of broken links which have yet to be fixed. I suggest moving the F1 team article back to McLaren with the appropriate hatnotes or having McLaren redirect to Team McLaren . Bretonbanquet (talk) 20:12, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Scratch that - McLaren hasn't been known as "Team McLaren" for about 30 years, hence it's not an appropriate name for the article. Simply "McLaren" is the best way. Bretonbanquet (talk) 20:48, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Strongly oppose this move. You moved McLaren to McLaren (racing) without any consensus whatsoever; that move should be reverted per WP:COMMONNAME and per this discussion at WT:F1. Maybe you should start discussions before making highly contentious moves that cause collaterial damage - this move appears to me a violation of WP:POINT. Let's type McLaren in on Google - what's the first thing to come up? Ah, the F1 team, so what do you do? Move it away from its common name. Typical. D.M.N. (talk) 19:03, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

I see you recently decided to move McLaren to McLaren (racing) and then redirected the original title to a disambiguation page. Before you did this, did you consider whether there is a primary topic for the ambiguous title? Be that as it may, you failed to check the title McLaren for redirects and incoming links that were affected by your actions. For example, it is pretty obvious that McLaren Racing and McLaren racing team should not have been left as redirects to the disambiguation page. Huge numbers of links from templates and other articles also needed to be fixed as part of this move. If you are going to change long-established article titles, it is your obligation to check for and fix collateral damage caused by the change. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 11:33, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
 * You've created a nightmare with this page move. Why didn't you discuss it anywhere? McLaren (racing) is really not an appropriate name for the article anyway. Are you going to fix the thousands of redirects now? Bretonbanquet (talk) 15:25, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Are you going to discuss this or are you just planning on creating a WP:POINT? D.M.N. (talk)
 * I'm here. What is your issue? If its the double redirects issue, that one is easily solved. If its the 'canonical usage', I will deal with that one. -Stevertigo 19:06, 7 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Two comments below were removed from WP:RFM by RFCbot. Restored here:


 * Strongly oppose this move. You moved McLaren to McLaren (racing) without any consensus whatsoever; that move should be reverted per WP:COMMONNAME and per this discussion at WT:F1. Maybe you should start discussions before making highly contentious moves that cause collaterial damage - this move appears to me a violation of WP:POINT. Let's type McLaren in on Google - what's the first thing to come up? Ah, the F1 team, so what do you do? Move it away from its common name. Typical. D.M.N. (talk) 19:03, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Question: Which is the canonical "McLaren"? Is it the group, the car, the racing outfit, the person, etc.? -Stevertigo 19:09, 7 June 2009 (UTC)


 * The team is the canonical McLaren, as is fairly clear. All the others have their own clearly delineated articles - Bruce McLaren, McLaren Group, the individual McLaren cars etc. Bretonbanquet (talk) 20:43, 7 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Do you have a source for the idea that a particular entity within an organization is more "canonical" than another entity (the car, for example) or the organization itself? You don't seem to have an argument, just an opinion. -Stevertigo 21:07, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Are you serious? I mean, you need a source to verify that an unspecified car from any given season is less important than the ongoing team that built it? I don't understand. Bretonbanquet (talk) 21:16, 7 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Move it all back. This is just daft. Beyond all the issues and this red herring of 'canon', we have the issue of common usage. The common usage for McLaren is the racing team that competes in F1. If Stevertigo has some argument about that, let him make it. He should have known this move would be controversial and he should have sought consensus to do so. -- Narson ~  Talk  • 22:32, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Frankly this is all ridiculous. There was not even a hint that there was any kind of issue prior to the original move from McLaren to McLaren (racing) - which apart from anything is a dreadful title all by itself as there are many different kinds of racing, foot, horse, motorcycle, yacht, etc. As it was this deeply flawed move, made without any hint of discussion that triggered this discussion, this needs to be abandoned, and the original move reverted, then the editor concerned can raise the issues of why McLaren should not be the article name for the F1 team. --Falcadore (talk) 22:51, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Two points. Firstly, I assume Stevertigo is new to Wikipedia. Please read WP:CONSENSUS and WP:NAME. The new name given to the McLaren article does not meet the requirements of WP:NAME, since it is extremely ambiguous, and no concensus was reached, or even attempted, for making the move. The second point is that the McLaren team is definitely the primary motorsport occupant of that name, as pointed out above, the other uses are clearly defined in their own right, and the team is the most suitable parent article for the others. The results of a google search strongly support this. 4u1e (talk) 06:16, 8 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Move everything back. The racing team is the primary meaning. Readro (talk) 09:20, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

I don't see a single argument outlined here in favour of keeping this move. I suggest a proper request to move everything back to how it was. Then, we can have a discussion to rearrange things if anyone has a sensible argument to put forward. Bretonbanquet (talk) 12:32, 8 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Move it all back. As per User:Readro. Cs-wolves  (talk)  16:58, 8 June 2009 (UTC)


 * You all appear to be under some misconceptions about how articles should be named and what disambiguation is about. In reality I see only opinion and opprobrium, not argument, in answer to my question above, which I will repeat in a different form: What makes the racing entity more 'canonical' than the car (overpriced, but notable), the company (which supercedes both), or the person, who seeded and thus in a certain respect supercedes all of the above entities? Taking it further, what actual argument supports the view that McLaren (pick an entity) is sufficiently canonical in its own right to supercede the personal name itself, or else a standard disambiguation page? In reality, "McLaren" by itself is a personal human name of Scottish origin, and is otherwise meaningless without context that amends the name with another concept (corporation, group, individual, tricycle, etc.). I understand that racing fans might eat and sleep in that context, but it should go without saying that the rest of us don't. I've got other things to do. -Stevertigo 15:34, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
 * You seem to be utterly ignoring the point that you were obliged to have this discussion before making such a move. If you want to question the way something is arranged, then do so, rather than crashing into something you clearly know nothing about and renaming an important article in an inappropriate way. Perhaps you'd like to supply an argument that proves your points? You can also explain what you mean by "canonical" in this context. If you have other things to do, I for one hope that those things don't include ignoring guidelines and causing mayhem somewhere else as you have done here. I suggest you also read Talk:McLaren (racing). Bretonbanquet (talk) 17:18, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Here are some user traffic statistics for the various "McLaren / MacLaren" articles, purely to give an idea of how many visits each article gets. Figures are for May 2009.

Bretonbanquet (talk) 17:41, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
 * McLaren F1 - 62,400
 * McLaren - 33,818
 * McLaren Automotive - 6675
 * McLaren Group - 3737
 * McLaren Technology Centre - 1520
 * Maclaren - 1246
 * McLaren Vale - 894
 * Clan MacLaren - 873
 * McLaren Park - 565
 * The McLaren Building - 325
 * McLaren (surname) - 232
 * McLaren Applied Technologies - 156
 * MacLaren (surname) - 128
 * McLaren Flat, South Australia - 102


 * I could only hope these other things you have to do is reading up on all the wikipedia policies and guidelines you've ignored to make this spectaculary inept point. While you might have had a good faith point in the beginning you methodology was wrong and the your destination was wrong, neither of those point has anything to do with the objections personal preferences. I also find it insulting that you have decided to tar anyone who objects to your actions as being 'fans', its as if you feel you can belittle the objections against by labelling these hardworking edittors with anoraks and Star Trek badges. If you have so many other supposedly more important things to do than to justify your actions, why are you working on wikipedia at all? --Falcadore (talk) 20:36, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
 * @Stevertigo, you say that there is no response to the move here other than "opinion and opprobium". Given that you made a fairly major move without following standard Wikipedia protocols, I think you should perhaps be expecting the opprobium. I initially thought you must be new here, but since you're a longstanding editor, there's really no excuse for your actions. It would probably help if you at least admitted your error there.
 * That of course has nothing to do with the merits of your arguments for the page move, so in response to your questions:
 * Q. What makes the racing entity more 'canonical' than the car (overpriced, but notable), the company (which supercedes both), or the person, who seeded and thus in a certain respect supercedes all of the above entities? A. Neither the car (McLaren F1) or the person (Bruce McLaren) share a name, common or official, with the team. Both have different and obvious natural names; the parent company (McLaren Group) only supercedes the F1 team in terms of organisational structure and is far less notable (supported by google results, and to be honest, common sense), smaller and much younger than the F1 team.
 * Q. what actual argument supports the view that McLaren (pick an entity) is sufficiently canonical in its own right to supercede the personal name itself, or else a standard disambiguation page? A. It probably doesn't make sense to use the surname as the most common use. It seems unlikely that anyone will be searching for just the surname: most likely they will have a whole name that they wish to search for. The google results given above support this contention, in that the F1 team is by far the most common search result. As another way of looking at it, do we give surnames priority in other cases of ambiguity?
 * Turning this on its head, please provide your supporting evidence that there was a problem of ambiguity in the first place, or that some other entity is equally notable to the team? I look forward to your response. Cheers. 4u1e (talk) 21:37, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Everyone above has up to now vociferously declared that the racing outfit is the canonical entity, and that the singular name most frequently and colloquially refers to the racing entity. User:Breton.. above did a straightforward traffic search which nullifies this conjecture entirely, showing instead that the car is the most searched for entity, not the racing outfit. The proportion between car and name is almost double.

4u above appears to suggest that those who viewed the name article were looking for the racing entity. But if they were looking for anything "McLaren" they might have been inconvenienced with racing outfit page, before getting to where they really wanted to go. So, its not possible to say that those page views were satisfactory for the end user. In fact, now it would be a good way to test whether as many people were really looking for the racing outfit at all: We will keep things as they are, and wait for the traffic results to see who deliberately chooses the racing entity article.

Its especially notable that my opposition has changed its argument. It means that the concepts upon which they based their reproach of my actions, were not correct to begin with, and that future arguments will probably find similar failings. Note also that while its possible that the car might be the canonical "McLaren," its not the actual name of the car and thus that article is fine where it is. Are there any other concerns anyone would like to share? Thank you Breton for the info. -Stevertigo 08:13, 10 June 2009 (UTC)


 * May I (humbly) suggest that the mere opposition that this move has revealed was reason enough not to move it in the first place without prior discussion? Beyond that, many people may believe McLaren F1 is the name of the team, and so searched there first, and were directed to the team page. 4u1e, and many others above, are correct in their view that the team does not share its name with people of the McLaren surname, and that people who know the last name generally know the first. Failing that, a simple hatnote on the top of team page linked to McLaren (disambiguation) suffices to solve any and all problems with articles with similar names. Aptery  gial  10:24, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I think I can clarify one or two things about the stats I posted. Of the 33,000-odd people who visited McLaren, it seems that they were happy with what they saw, because very very few of them went on to visit other pages, particularly the surname pages that have been so highly promoted. If those people, when faced with the article about the F1 team, had wished to see some other article, the figures for that other article would have been a lot higher. Instead, the figures for the others are negligible.
 * The other point to make is that "McLaren F1" is not only the name of the car, but also a very likely search term for the F1 team, and the 62,000-odd hits for McLaren F1 will certianly include people looking for the F1 team. These figures prove beyond any reasoned argument that the McLaren F1 article is fine where it is, and the F1 team article should be at McLaren, where 33,000 people expected to find it. This figure seems confirmed in the light of comparable F1 team articles like 47,000 hits for Scuderia Ferrari and 66,000 for Brawn GP. I'll add that the chances of the F1 team article remaining at McLaren (racing) are zero. Bretonbanquet (talk) 13:45, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

As in the meantime the main team article moved back to McLaren, succeeding in its move it has made this discussion rather moot. I propose that we close this move discussion. --Falcadore (talk) 23:51, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Seconded. This move clearly had minimal support anyway. Bretonbanquet (talk) 00:02, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Primary topic
Click through to McLaren to verify the primary topic. Use WP:RM to move McLaren elsewhere and move the dab to the base name. See WP:MOSDAB for how primary topics are handled on disambiguation pages. -- JHunterJ (talk) 21:02, 18 May 2013 (UTC)


 * I've seen the edit war going on here today – bringing it here is the only way to resolve this. Not sure what the actual problem is. Bretonbanquet (talk) 21:10, 18 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Either
 * The race team is the primary topic, and the dab page starts off with that definition and then goes on to "may also refer to", or
 * (After a RM) the race team is no longer the primary topic and the clan is primary, so the dab page starts with that definition and goes on to "McLaren may also refer to", or
 * (After a RM) there is no primary topic and the dab page is moved to "McLaren" and starts off with "McLaren may refer to:".
 * So as it stands, before any page moves, the dab page is correctly formatted in this version.  Pam  D  22:09, 18 May 2013 (UTC)


 * I don't think there's a debate about the primary topic; as far as I can see, it's about the formatting of the dab page. As PamD says, the version she links to is correct. Bretonbanquet (talk) 22:31, 18 May 2013 (UTC)
 * If we want to discuss the primary topic, that should begin here on the talk page as is a separate topic from formatting (just to not conflate the two valid discussions). The DAB is formatted correctly per PamD and JHunterJ (as is current). Widefox ; talk 19:29, 19 May 2013 (UTC)
 * I moved the partial matches to the bottom (although I can understand a manufacturer with few models might have them listed here, but a SIA might be the place for them). As I prefer sections more than the other editors, and many of us have looked at this page, I won't mind if others change this. Widefox ; talk 19:53, 19 May 2013 (UTC)

McLaren Vale (disambiguation)
An edit adding the following entry to the page was removed for the following reasons: * McLaren Vale, two locations in South Australia


 * 1) McLaren Vale (disambiguation) was created to deal with the problem of articles being linked to the wrong article, i.e. going to and McLaren Vale, South Australia which was missing from the page. Therefore, it was reasonable to remove McLaren Vale from the page after McLaren Vale (disambiguation) was added to 'See also'.
 * 2) Also, the removed entry does not appear to comply with the requirements of WikiProject Disambiguation, i.e. no piped links.

Regards Cowdy001 (talk) 03:30, 15 December 2018 (UTC)


 * I added the link because I feel that relegating McLaren Vale and McLaren Vale, South Australia to a link to a disambiguation page in the "See also" section makes them unnecessarily harder to find for readers who arrive at this page looking for a place they've heard of called "McLaren " in South Australia.
 * My preferred solution is for McLaren Vale and McLaren Vale, South Australia to be listed explicitly in the "Places" section (as in this version of the page) but that was changed, so I tried adding the link to McLaren Vale (disambiguation) in the "Places" section as an alternative.
 * I also note that the handling of the two "McLaren Vale"s seems inconsistent with the handling of the two "McLaren Park"s: both of those are accessible though the McLaren Park disambiguation page, yet both are explicitly listed in the "Places" section of this page. DH85868993 (talk) 06:07, 15 December 2018 (UTC)